Found Journal Series at the Anchor House

Show is up and looks great in the space.

Gallery Director, Michael Tillyer, persuaded me to have the found journal pages on display along with the art.  I have always been protective of them, so I initially felt uncomfortable, but now I see how powerful it is to include them.

Please come join us at the opening on Friday night Northampton’s Arts Night Out

February 10 5:30 - 8:30p.m.

Anchor House of Artists

518 Pleasant St., Northampton

gallery hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday 1-6p.m.

The Journal Series Continues

You Gonna Tell Me
What Control Device I Must Develop To Be A Human?
2013
acrylic
36x36


I am still working away at this found journal series.

See the explanation back on Jan 17, 2013 if you don't know what I am referring to.

 I intersperse this work with oil painting and printmaking because it is so intense and emotionally draining.  Very rewarding, though.

You Have Nerves

You Have Nerves That End in Ideas
2013
36x48
acrylic

This is the latest in the Found Journal Series.  This has been a complex and totally gratifying project.

I am enjoying the acrylics more than I ever thought I would,

Sometimes My Frame of Mind Isn't Framed
2013
40x30
acrylic




This is also from the "Found Journal Series"








This one has some subtle colors that don't come through so well in this picture.  I might try to photograph it again.

From the Found Journal

I Really Would Eat Poison with a Smile



2013
24x24
acrylic








This is another from the Found Journal Series, so please don't get worried about my emotional state!
You can read about it in the previous entry, if you missed it last week.

I am choosing the titles directly from the text.

Today I Am Almost Scared How Fine I Almost Feel
2013
30x40
acrylic

It is a spring evening in 1989 and I am walking down a street in Santa Monica, California.
Blowing down the same street are gobs of papers, partial notebooks, blue exam books, like the contents of a school knapsack emptied at the bus stop by the bully.

I start scooping them up.  I don't know, maybe I thought I was retrieving them for their owner, but there was no one, distraught, running after them.

As it turned out, they were fragments of someone's journal, bits and pieces of anguish spanning a decade.
I do not use the word anguish here lightly.
Contained, barely contained in the scrawl and rambles was a story of such darkness and repeated efforts to crawl out from under unbearable despair.

I do not know who the author is, but she seemed as thrown away and blown away as her papers, and so, I saved them.

Every so often I would pull them out, read some of them over, and then put them away again.  They were just so dark.

But I have kept them, nearly 25 years now, because I felt there had to be something I could do with them.
And I didn't want to give up on her.

I think I am now ready to give them new life.

This painting came out from a page she wrote in 1978.  An up day.

That is where the title comes from.